Improved detection of small objects in road network sequences using CNN and super resolution

The detection of small objects is one of the problems present in deep learning due to the context of the scene or the low number of pixels of the objects to be detected. According to these problems, current pre-trained models based on convolutional neural networks usually give a poor average precision, highlighting some as CenterNet HourGlass104 with a mean average precision of 25.6%, or SSD-512 with 9%. This work focuses on the detection of small objects. In particular, our proposal aims to vehicle detection from images captured by video surveillance cameras with pretrained models without modifying their structures, so it does not require retraining the network to improve the detection rate of the elements. For better performance, a technique has been developed which, starting from certain initial regions, detects a higher number of objects and improves their class inference without modifying or retraining the network. The neural network is integrated with processes that are in charge of increasing the resolution of the images to improve the object detection performance. This solution has been tested for a set of traffic images containing elements of different scales to check the efficiency depending on the detections obtained by the model. Our proposal achieves good results in a wide range of situations, obtaining, for example, an average score of 45.1% with the EfficientDet-D4 model for the first video sequence, compared to the 24.3% accuracy initially provided by the pre-trained model.This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain [grant number RTI2018-094645-B-I00], project name Automated detection with low-cost hardware of unusual activities in video sequences. It is also partially supported by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) under project UMA18-FEDERJA-084, project name Detection of anomalous behaviour agents by deep learning in low-cost video surveillance intelligent systems. All of them include funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). It is also partially supported by the University of Málaga (Spain) under grants B1-2019_01, project name Anomaly detection on roads by moving cameras, and B1-2019_02, project name Self-Organizing Neural Systems for Non-Stationary Environments. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the SCBI (Supercomputing and Bioinformatics) center of the University of Málaga. The authors acknowledge the funding from the Universidad de Málaga. I.G.-A. is funded by a scholarship from the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) under the Young Employment operative program [grant number SNGJ5Y6-15]. They also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of two Titan X GPUs. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBUA